


Shades of Life

by TheLadyLepida



Category: Fargo (2014)
Genre: Ableism, F/F, F/M, Genderbending, Language, M/M, One Shot Collection, Sexism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 06:06:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1808131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLadyLepida/pseuds/TheLadyLepida
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four different forms, four different relationships. There will always be a Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench. [Includes: Mr. Wrench/Mr. Numbers, Ms. Wrench/Mr. Numbers, Mr. Wrench/Ms. Numbers, and Ms. Wrench/Ms. Numbers]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shades of Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer:
> 
> 1.) 'Fargo' belongs to Ethan and Joel Coen.
> 
> 2.) The title of the story was taken from The Beatles' 'Across the Universe.'
> 
> A/N:
> 
> 1.) I may include gender bender! Lorne/Lester at some point, but for now this story revolves exclusively around the Wrenchers pairing. 
> 
> 2.) I'll get back to Hard Crimson eventually. Chapter 4 is giving me some issues.

* * *

**Mis.no.mer** [mis- **noh** -mer]

 _**noun** _

1\. a misapplied or inappropriate name or designation.

2\. an error in naming a person or thing.

* * *

The first thing that comes to Number's mind is,  _Wow._  (And it's not the kind of 'Wow' you get when you're gazing upon something wondrous; it's more of a 'Wow' when you're confronted with something strange and somewhat horrifying.)

The second is,  _She's fucking tall._

Taller than him, a man of perfectly average height, taller than any woman he's ever met. She looks big as well, but Numbers is sure it's just the fringed leather jacket she's wearing that makes her look broader than she really is. It's a ridiculous jacket. It looks like something a cowboy would wear. All she needs is the hat to go with it. 

He wonders if she wears it to look intimidating, and he can't help the little scoff that escapes his mouth. The fact that it's a men's jacket is enough to make her look ridiculous; the dangling fringe doesn't help. It looks like something he'd see someone wear at a gay bar.

Although Numbers had been told that she was deaf and couldn't have possibly heard him, the woman narrows her eyes at him, her gaze sharpening as if she could drill a hole in his head and peer inside to get a good look at his thoughts. She had obviously picked up on his disdain, despite her handicap. 

She has an unnerving glare that makes him feel like a little kid again, a little kid that wants to bury his face in his mother's skirt, hide from the boogie man. Numbers refuses to be cowed. He had spent enough years being terrified of his mother and despite the fact that the bitch was long dead, the fear was still there. The fact that she can make him remember what that stomach wrenching fear felt like makes him simmer with resentment. This modern-day Greek warrior (Shit, what did they call them?) chick was going to have to try a hell of lot harder to scare him. 

So he puts on his friendliest, 'Can I buy you a drink?' smile and takes in the rest of her appearance with deliberate obviousness. There's hardly anything about her that could be seen as conventionally feminine, as if she had made an effort to erase it away. She's dressed practically for both the job and the current weather: tight (but not ridiculously so) blue jeans that emphasizes her lean build tucked into brown cowboy boots; a zipped black coat under her silly jacket, obscuring her chest (not that he was looking), a prudish turtleneck under that.

She's made up of long limbs, loosely bolted arms and legs like those of a teenage boy, of jagged angles instead of lush curves, as sharp as as a blade (possibly as sharp as the knife tucked into her belt), as sharp as the teeth in her wolf-like stare. Numbers imagines the bones lying beneath her milk-white skin, all sharpened to a point, ready to put holes into anybody who gets too close. 

Her hair is a reddish brown, more brown than red, curls tumbling over her ears while the length of it is pulled back into a high ponytail. His fingers twitch at the sight of the curls brushing her cheeks. Numbers loves playing with women's hair, especially curly hair. When he finds himself wondering what she would look like with her hair down, he has to force himself to focus on the features of her face, which is surprisingly bare of freckles. It's odd because he figured all of the good-looking redheads had freckles. 

 _Maybe she has them in other places,_ the little voice in his head whispers, and Numbers feels his mouth go dry. That little voice immediately sparks images of the naked Amazon through his head, and Numbers feels like a teenager again. He doesn't like it one bit. His expression must have gone sour because now she's scowling at him even more. 

He looks up at her, which he hates doing, and the features of her face, completely free of make-up, are as sharp and cold as the rest of her. Her nose is long and thin, upturned and pointy, like a witch's nose. Her cheekbones are high and prominent and her face is long and narrowly-shaped, like that of a horse. She's not an attractive woman. She's as plain as the oatmeal he had eaten for breakfast and the scowl on her face doesn't do her any favors. But then again, Numbers is so used to seeing women all primped, plucked, and painted up that maybe natural beauty has been ruined for him. The most appealing thing about her are her eyes. They're a combination of blue-green, not just one or the other, the kind of color that makes him think when light hits the shallow end of a pond and illuminates it in such a way that you can get a crystal-clear look of the bottom through the surface of the water.

But when Numbers looks her in the eyes, he doesn't see a bottom. There is no light illuminating her eyes from the inside. It's all dark inside, like a well. Either that, or she's getting pissed at him for staring at her for so long. Numbers is going to go with the latter.

But what the fuck is he supposed to do? He doesn't have a problem with her being a woman, as it wasn't a strictly male-only business, but he doesn't know any sign language or anything about deaf people for that matter. How do the higher-ups expect him to communicate with her? How do they expect her to watch his back with her handicap?

 _Fuck this,_ Numbers wants to say but he just plasters a pleasant smile on his face and he holds out his hand, introducing himself by the pseudonym he's expected to go by. "They call me Mr. Numbers. What about you?" He feels fucking stupid talking to a deaf woman, feels more like he's talking to a statue. 

She doesn't take his hand, as he had expected. But she does something else that he hadn't expected: she speaks.

"Wrench." Her voice has a strange accent. It sounds muffled, as if she had something stuffed down her throat. 

Numbers is so surprised that he doesn't even wonder how she earned her nickname; instead he finds himself saying, "You can  _talk_?"

Immediately, her face darkens with anger and the realization that she can read lips makes him blanch under his beard.  _Shit._

"Yes, I can  _talk_ , you stupid motherfucker," Wrench spits at him. Her face grows red and blotchy, from her cheeks to what little he can see of her swan-like neck. Numbers also notices that the very tip of her nose has gone red, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and it's so goddamn adorable that he starts laughing. 

It's not regular laughing either; it's loud, unstoppable laughter. The kind of laughter that involves snorting like a pig, snot clogging the nose, tears rolling down the face and painful hiccuping. 

The whole situation is so goddamn ridiculous. He's bent over, laughing like a lunatic, and _Ms._ Wrench is standing over him, hands curled into fists, looking like she's about to send him flying straight to the moon. _POW! Goodbye, Alice!_ Through the tears in his eyes, he notices that her fingers are long and thing, elegant like an artist's or a pianist's. He can see the veins, blue-green like her eyes, underneath the skin staring from her wrists towards the center of her hand, a road map that ends abruptly in the fingertips. Vaguely, Numbers recalls that some ancient cultures believed that a vein in the fourth finger, the ring finger, led directly to the heart. The  _vena amoris_ , or the "vein of love." Wrench's hands are the only fragile, delicate part of her.

She leans over him, looking for all the world an Amazon warrior ready to bludgeon him with a war ax, and says to him, in that odd, yet compelling voice, "You want to know why they call me 'Wrench?'"

His laughter is already mostly dead by this point, but he's still too late for him to avoid the fist that comes flying at his face. Before his eye and pain acknowledge each other like old friends, Numbers notices that Wrench's fingernails are painted a dark shade of purple, the color of the black eye that he wakes up with the next day.

It is also on that day, after he puts an icepack on his eye and while he's nursing his wounded pride with a Jack and Coke, that he realizes that he was wrong about Ms. Wrench's hands. There was nothing delicate, or fragile, or soft about them. Numbers figured that whoever gave Wrench her name had thought that it had sounded sexier than sledgehammer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:
> 
> 1.) Originally, this one-shot only happened because I wanted a female! Wrench to call Numbers a stupid motherfucker. But then I got the idea to write four different aspects of their relationship; this is the first one. Part 2 of 'First Impressions Universe A' will be in Ms. Wrench's point of view. :)
> 
> 2.) Expect the rating to go up and more tags as the story proceeds. The one-shots may vary in length because, seeing as I am writing this on impulse, I have no idea what I'm doing. :) :D


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